Unity allows you to set the level of graphical quality it will attempt to render. Generally speaking, quality comes at the expense of framerate and so it may be best not to aim for the highest quality on mobile devices or older hardware since it will have a detrimental effect on gameplay. The Quality Settings inspector (menu: Edit & Project Settings & Quality) is used to select the quality level in the editor for the chosen device. It is split into two main areas - at the top, there is the following matrix:
Unity lets you assign a name to a given combination of quality options for easy reference. The rows of the matrix let you choose which of the different platforms each quality level will apply to. The Default row at the bottom of the matrix is not a quality level in itself but rather sets the default quality level used for each platform (a green checkbox in a column denotes the level currently chosen for that platform). Unity comes with six quality levels pre-enabled but you can add your own levels using the button below the matrix. You can use the trashcan icon (the rightmost column) to delete an unwanted quality level.
You can click on the name of a quality level to select it for editing, which is done in the panel below the settings matrix:
The quality options you can choose for a quality level are as follows:
The name that will be used to refer to this quality level
Pixel Light Count
The maximum number of pixel lights when Forward Rendering is used.
Texture Quality
This lets you choose whether to display textures at maximum resolution or at a fraction of this (lower resolution has less processing overhead). The options are Full Res, Half Res, Quarter Res and Eighth Res.
Anisotropic Textures
This enables if and how anisotropic textures will be used. The options are Disabled, Per Texture and Forced On (ie, always enabled).
AntiAliasing
This sets the level of antialiasing that will be used. The options are 2x, 4x and 8x multi-sampling.
Soft Particles
Should soft blending be used for particles?
Realtime Reflection Probes
be updated during gameplay?
This determines which type of shadows should be used. The available options are Hard and Soft Shadows, Hard Shadows Only and Disable Shadows.
Shadow resolution
Shadows can be rendered at several different resolutions: Low, Medium, High and Very High. The higher the resolution, the greater the processing overhead.
Shadow Projection
There are two different methods for projecting shadows from a directional light. Close Fit renders higher resolution shadows but they can sometimes wobble slightly if the camera moves. Stable Fit renders lower resolution shadows but they don’t wobble with camera movements.
Shadow Cascades
The number of shadow cascades can be set to zero, two or four. A higher number of cascades gives better quality but at the expense of processing overhead (see the Directional Shadows page for further details).
Shadow Distance
The maximum distance from camera at which shadows will be visible. Shadows that fall beyond this distance will not be rendered.
Blend Weights
The number of bones that can affect a given vertex during an animation. The available options are one, two or four bones.
VSync Count
Rendering can be synchronised with the refresh rate of the display device to avoid “tearing” artifacts (see below). You can choose to synchronise with every vertical blank (VBlank), every second vertical blank or not to synchronise at all.
LOD levels are chosen based on the onscreen size of an object. When the size is between two LOD levels, the choice can be biased toward the less detailed or more detailed of the two models available. This is set as a fraction from 0 to +infinity. When it is set between 0 and 1 it favors less detail. A setting of more than 1 favors greater detail. For example, setting LOD Bias to 2 and having it change at 50% distance, LOD actually only changes on 25%.
Maximum LOD Level
The highest LOD that will be used by the game. See note below for more Information.
Particle Raycast Budget
The maximum number of raycasts to use for approximate particle system collisions (those with Medium or Low quality). See .
MaximumLOD level
Models which have a LOD below the MaximumLOD level will not be used and omitted from the build (which will save storage and memory space). Unity will use the smallest LOD value from all the MaximumLOD values linked with the quality settings for the target platform. If an LOD level is included then models from that LODGroup will be included in the build and always loaded at runtime for that LODGroup, regardless of the quality setting being used. As an example, if LOD level 0 is used in any quality setting then all the LOD levels will be included in the build and all the referenced models loaded at runtime.
The picture on the display device is not continuously updated but rather the updates happen at regular intervals much like frame updates in Unity. However, Unity’s updates are not necessarily synchronised with those of the display, so it is possible for Unity to issue a new frame while the display is still rendering the previous one. This will result in a visual artifact called “tearing” at the position onscreen where the frame change occurs.
Simulated example of tearing. The shift in the picture is clearly visible in the magnified portion.
It is possible to set Unity to switch frames only during the period where the display device is not updating, the so-called “vertical blank”. The VSync option on the Quality Settings synchronises frame switches with the device’s vertical blank or optionally with every other vertical blank. The latter may be useful if the game requires more than one device update to complete the rendering of a frame.
Anti-aliasing
Anti aliasing improves the appearance of polygon edges, so they are not “jagged”, but smoothed out on the screen. However, it incurs a performance cost for the graphics card and uses more video memory (there’s no cost on the CPU though). The level of anti-aliasing determines how smooth polygon edges are (and how much video memory does it consume).
Without anti-aliasing, polygon edges are “jagged”.
With 4x anti-aliasing, polygon edges are smoothed out.
However, built-in hardware anti-aliasing does not work for these cases you’ll need to use .
Soft Particles
Soft Particles fade out near intersections with other scene geometry. This looks much nicer, however it’s more expensive to compute (more complex pixel shaders), and only works on platforms that support . Furthermore, you have to use
rendering path, or make the camera render
from scripts.
Without Soft Particles - visible intersections with the scene.
With Soft Particles - intersections fade out smoothly.
Player Settings
Graphics SettingsCould Microsoft upgrade the Xbox One’s hardware to fix the PS4 performance gap?By
on August 5, 2014 at 12:05 pm
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As you are well aware, there is a sizable gap between . While both chips have fairly similar custom-built AMD APUs, the PS4
is equipped with a GPU that has 50% more cores (and thus about 50% more raw power) than the Xbox One. On the CPU side of things, the Xbox One
actually has about a 10% advantage over the PS4 due to a higher clock speed. But who says this will always be the case? It’s not unusual for a console to be tweaked or upgraded multiple times throughout its lifetime as new (cheaper) hardware becomes available. Because both consoles use fairly standard PC hardware, could Sony or Microsoft upgrade their consoles to close (or widen) the current performance gap?The short answer is yes, there’s no reason Sony or Microsoft couldn’t approach
and ask for a faster, beefier . The real answer, as you can probably imagine, is a lot more complex than that.The Xbox One APU. It could theoretically be upgraded to a bigger CPU or GPU, but in practice it’s unlikely.While a lot has been said about the PS4 and Xbox One being almost PCs, it’s important to note that, from the perspective of the developer, they’re still very much an appliance. When you develop a game for the PC, you design the game so that it can gracefully scale up and down depending on the available resources (CPU, GPU, RAM). When you develop a game for a console, you target a very specific hardware setup. This is actually a good thing as far as the developer is concerned, because you can guarantee that the console will have certain resources available, and can thus hard-code the game to make optimal use of those resources. This is why PS2 and PS3 games became very impressive towards the end of their lives, as developers finally sussed out all of the Emotion Engine/Cell processor secrets.The problem is, if you change the hardware of a game console just a tiny bit, all of those hard-coded optimizations suddenly break. If your game leverages some quirk in the ESRAM of the Xbox One, and the Microsoft goes and fixes (breaks) that quirk, then suddenly your game stops working. Likewise, if the developer hand-tweaks the number of polygons on-screen at any one time to ensure the console’s GPU can stick to 60 fps, then upgrading the GPU isn’t likely to do much of anything. Even worse, if any developers do decide to target the new version of the console with upgraded hardware, then consumers with the old version of the console won’t be able to play the game.Upgrading a console’ the CPU or GPU, not so muchThis is why, historically, consoles have remained virtually unchanged throughout their life cycle. Historically it was fairly normal for the console maker to reduce costs by stepping down to a new process node, or by integrating multiple components into a single big chip, but a huge amount of care was taken to ensure that the performance, timings, and quirks of the new hardware exactly matched the original version of the console. I’m not aware of any console hardware revision that increased CPU speed, or RAM size or speed.Of course, that doesn’t mean that other parts of the console can’t be upgraded. As we’ve seen in the past, the console maker can increase the size of the hard drive (or remove it entirely), or remove various sockets/features from the logic board to reduce costs/hackability. Some features, like the console’s WiFi or Ethernet adapter, could be safely upgraded to the newest/fastest standard. [Read: ]Original PS2 system board (top) vs. the newer PS2 Slimline (bottom). Note the two big chips (GS and EE) have merged into one chip (under the grey cover).Having said all that, I could be wrong. Maybe the PS4 and Xbox One are more upgradable than their forebears. If developers are actually sticking to the official SDK and not wandering too far off-piste, then it might actually be possible to upgrade the CPU and RAM without too much difficulty (I’m still very doubtful about the GPU, due to backwards compatibility with older consoles). These upgrades probably wouldn’t boost gaming performance very much, but the console might boot up faster, switch between apps faster, and offer better multitasking capabilities. Another possibility is that Microsoft or Sony could release an abstraction (emulation) layer that allows older software to run on upgraded hardware, but I think this is unlikely.I think the only scenario where we might see a significant CPU or GPU upgrade is if the Xbox One
by the time second-generation games roll around. Diehards are holding onto onto the hope that the Xbox One’s ESRAM will be the secret weapon that gets the console up to a stable 1080p @ 60 fps — but we’ll have to wait and see.
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